#CAPIdeas

Conversations from the Center for American Progress’s annual Ideas Conference, with Betsey Stevenson, Darrick Hamilton, and Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

For this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, we got the chance to sit down with some of the leaders at the Center for American Progress’s annual Ideas Conference — so we’re bringing you some of those conversations.

Rebecca talks with Betsey Stevenson, an economist, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, and former member of the White House Council on Economic Advisers under President Obama; Darrick Hamilton, Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University and a professor at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs; and Wisconsin Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes, the youngest Lt. Governor in the country, first black Lt. Governor in the state of Wisconsin, and the first African-American to hold statewide office in Wisconsin in decades.

This week’s guests:

• Betsey Stevenson, professor of public policy, University of Michigan
• Darrick Hamilton, executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, The Ohio State University
• Mandela Barnes, Lt. Governor, Wisconsin

This week’s transcript:

♪ I work and get paid like minimum wage

sights to hit the class by the end of the day

hot from downtown into the hood where I stay

the only place I can afford ’cause my block ain’t saved

I spend most of my time working, trying to bring in…. ♪

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. For this week’s episode of Off-Kilter I got a chance to sit down with some of the leaders at the Center for American Progress’s annual Ideas Conference. So, we’re bringing you some of those conversations. I talked with Betsey Stevenson, economist and professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and former member of the White House Council on Economic Advisers under President Obama. Later in the show, Darrick Hamilton, the Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. But first, Wisconsin Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes, the youngest Lt. Governor in the United States, the first black Lt. Governor in Wisconsin, and the first African American to hold statewide office in Wisconsin in decades. Let’s take a listen.

Lt. Governor, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show.

LT. GOVERNOR BARNES Yeah. Thank you for having me, Live from the Netroots Bar.

Live from the Netroots Bar. I wish we were at it, right? So, I feel like it’s probably the right place to start for any of our listeners who don’t know you, to sort of tell a little bit about your story of how you got to where you are. Why did you get into elected office? Your personal story has a lot to do with the issues that you work on.

BARNES: I think my personal story has everything to do with the reason I am in public office, and it’s not from coming from some political family or some wealthy family. It’s about coming from the city of Milwaukee and the experiences that people have and having an understanding of those experiences. You know, I talk a lot about where I was born, the schools I attended because they’re an important part of my story. Having been born in the heart of the nation’s poor, or excuse me, the state’s poorest, and our nation’s most incarcerated zip code, having attended some very challenged schools. And I always say challenged because I like to remind people there’s no such thing as a failing school, just a failed community. And having been a part of everything that goes with that, you know, having unfortunately lost friends to gun violence, having unfortunately lost friends to the criminal justice system, having not fallen victim to those statistics created a sort of calling. Because who’s going to speak for those people? I mean these are the people I grew up with: same neighborhood, same schools. Yet our pasts were drastically different. And if I could speak to those as much as I’m able to, especially in the conversation about crafting policy and making sure that the state of Wisconsin, and ultimately this nation, is more equitable for everybody who lives here. Those voices aren’t often at the table, and some of those voices will never be at the table. One, like I said, the friends who have been lost to violence, who left this earth too soon, and those who have a criminal record, who probably aren’t ever going to be able to run for office.

And yet I know that that comes from a lack of opportunity. And my blue-collar upbringing: my grandfather moved to Milwaukee after he served in World War II, worked in a factory for about 30 or 40 years, retired comfortably. My dad followed suit and worked at a factory for about 30 years. I broke that the industrial mode in my family, but even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do it, not because I don’t want to. It’s because those opportunities aren’t available for people my age anymore, not at that level. People don’t go to work somewhere and leave that same place 30 years later. And so, realizing that where we are as a state, Wisconsin, we need a big, bold vision to transform or to recreate ourselves. And not just to change who we are or change our history or our culture or anything, but to reinvent ourselves. Because again, the manufacturing base that once was is not the case anymore. We’ve lost 300 dairy farms already this year. And so, we need some new life pumped into us into the way that we do things in the state, especially in policy to benefit people. It’s not about the regional battles that we’ve been involved in for a long time where we had a governor who pitted one area of the state versus another. This about all of us coming together to come up with solutions.

VALLAS: So, you are also the youngest Lt. Governor in the country. You are the first black Lt. Governor of the state of Wisconsin. You’re also the first African American to hold statewide office in Wisconsin in decades. How does that inform the approach that you’re taking to this office and to the policy agenda that you’re carrying out?

BARNES: Yeah, I think that we can go from the policy side, even the political side, where we’ve had trouble connecting with younger voters and voters in communities of color. And I think that explains most of what happened in Wisconsin in 2016. And I thought to myself, well, we need to be sure that we are connecting with communities that we call our base. We can’t just call them our base and expect them to show up to vote for us. We actually have to engage thoughtfully and engage meaningfully. And so, when I’m involved in policy conversations, a lot of times I’m the only person in my age group. I’m the only person, I can a lot of times me the only person of color in many rooms. And even with the most well-intentioned people, you can come up with some very poor decision making when the discussion of communities of color and younger people is being had and through no fault of their own. It’s just the fact that when somebody isn’t there to speak up for themselves, chances are that perspective will never get heard.

And we have some the worst disparities among racial lines in the state of Wisconsin, highest rate of black male incarceration at 13 percent, which is twice the national average. Black people make up 6 percent of the state’s population, over 50 percent of the prison population. You look at the income inequality issue that primarily hits communities of color. We haven’t seen this level of income inequality since the Great Depression. And I will never brag about a low unemployment rate because we have a very high jobless rate. We have a lot of people who are working much more for much less, working 40 hours a week, still struggling to make ends meet. And that’s a real problem. And whether it’s being the young part or being the first African American to hold this office, I’ve also dealt a lot of these adverse economic circumstances.

I always make the joke: several years ago where I got laid off from a job where my job was to help people find jobs, [chuckling] you know. So, I could literally, very directly speak to the state of the economy for people my age. I have been on food stamps as an adult. I was unemployed long-term before. And people always to put that out there it’s like, “Oh, people on unemployment are lazy,” which isn’t the case. Are there people who cheat the system? Of course, there are a handful of people, just like anything else. You look at the bulk of tax breaks that are going to large corporations who take jobs overseas, that’s where the real abuse is at. And that’s where the real fraud is. And first week of unemployment, that was cool. It was fun. After that, it was not fun. Then every other week, I’m like, all right, I’ve got to find a job. This is not fun. This is not OK. And there is so many people in similar situations who are just working hard or trying their best to get ahead, but there’s a lack of opportunity for them.

VALLAS: So, part of the challenge that you’re facing and that your administration that you’re part of is facing in Wisconsin, you mentioned that you’re facing some of the highest rates of poverty that the state has seen since the Great Depression. The same with the rates of inequality that Wisconsin is seeing. But you’re also coming in after a gubernatorial administration, Scott Walker, who was notorious, and in some cases, actually legendary for encapsulating a lot of the policy proposals and advancing a lot of the policy proposals that are really what we’ve seen from Trump and from other Republicans in actually national office that are trickle down economics, that are all the things that we know don’t actually cut poverty, don’t cut inequality, but instead, make rich people a hell of a lot richer while making it harder for other people to get by. What is it like stepping into a policy landscape in a state that has, for some time, been run by someone who was working at completely the opposite agenda set of purposes?

BARNES: Yeah, I always try to remind people that without Governor Scott Walker, there would’ve been no President Donald Trump. I think he helped popularize or help normalize a culture of division, pitting one group of people versus another. And Donald Trump just kind of took that to an entirely different level. And Governor Walker’s M.O. was consolidating power. That’s what it was all about. We saw that, when we came into office as well, we saw that frame of thought continue with the lame duck session where the legislators felt it was their duty to sort of continue on a third term of the Scott Walker administration. But that wasn’t the case. People voted for a new direction in the state of Wisconsin, and now we have a very out of touch legislature who’s been elected because of some illegally-drawn maps, through some wildly-gerrymandered maps. They’re existing inside of their own bubbles. When they say you’re in Milwaukee or Madison bubble, they are actually in their own bubbles that they drew themselves.

And with that said, you get a lot of out of touch governing. Medicaid expansion is popular among 70 percent of people in the state of Wisconsin. 70 percent of states have taken the Medicaid expansion. At the same time, they soundly have rejected Medicaid expansion; they have taken it out of the budget. And that’s a problem because the will of the people is not being served. You look at issues, you look at the abortion issue, Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, [chuckling] and Wisconsin. And look: because it’s another area where they’re out of touch. They have 63 members out of 99 in their caucus. They got 40, I want to say, 7 percent of the popular vote with 63 percent of the seats. And it doesn’t add up. And out of those 63 members, their majority leader in the Assembly was able to fit every woman member of their caucus into a single tweet. And —

VALLAS: I’m counting characters in my head thinking about what that means. But that means not a lot of winners.

BARNES: That means not a lot if you have 63 members and percentage-wise, it doesn’t say a whole lot either. And these are the people who are making decisions about women’s health, and not just even the abortion bill that was just introduced and passed in the Assembly. It’s about a healthy babies, healthy women initiatives that we had in our state budget that they took out.

VALLAS: And that’s an abortion bill that the governor that you work with has actually pledged to veto.

BARNES: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I should make that very clear. There is a line in the sand that’s drawn with that veto pen. And like I said, we had a provision in the budget for healthy women, healthy babies to make sure that when — Because we have a very high infant mortality rate in the state of Wisconsin, and it is particularly higher with black women. And we want to make sure that once babies are born, they have a shot at survival. And that has been dismissed by this out of touch legislature.

VALLAS: So, what are the policies that your administration is seeking to advance that would cut poverty, that would cut inequality, that you think are actually possible with a legislature that isn’t necessarily on the same page for all the bubble connect reasons that you’ve been describing?

BARNES: And that’s the thing too. Because there’s no point in us bending at the will of this legislature when we have the support of a majority of people in the state. So, the obvious answer, the very minimal step of increasing the minimum wage is something they’ve shown just direct and absolute opposition to. On top of that, I mean you look at where job creation and job growth is happening across this country, it’s happening in renewable energy: solar and wind. And that is why in our budget, we’re creating our Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy to make sure that we are a state that promotes growth of clean energy, starting with our public buildings, making sure that our state is leading by example, official state buildings. But also putting money into research: $4 million for research grants. Because again, the technology that exists today is going to be different in the next 5 to 10 years, and we have a chance, we have an opportunity to be on the cutting edge. Prior to the former governor, we were on the cutting edge of change in the way of being a clean energy leader. And when the new governor took office, that all stalled. So, from 2010, we were in the same place with the percentage of our energy that was generated carbon free, all the way to 2018 or 19, stagnant, no growth. And that’s not sustainable for the future of our planet and also for the future of our economy. This is an issue of health. It’s an issue of economics, which collectively makes it an issue of justice.

VALLAS: Now in the last couple minutes that I have with you, it’s not just your legislature that is in tension with what your administration and the state is trying to achieve. It is also, of course, the Trump administration, and to some extent, some parts of Congress. Although we do have this Democratic-controlled House trying to do its thing. But you actually came into office on the heels of this Blue Wave that a lot of people paid attention to at the federal level, didn’t maybe pay quite as much attention to at the state level. But it swept in leaders across the country like you into really important positions in states. What has it been like being at the forefront of a state-based administration seeking to pursue and advance progressive policies following that Blue Wave election but while we’re still dealing with Trump’s economy, Trump’s America, the Trump policy agenda? And on top of the aftermath of the Wisconsin Republican party power grab last winter that you were just describing.

BARNES: So, while it is very frustrating — I am currently frustrated — it gives us an opportunity to create a contrast so that people know who is fighting for them, who’s fighting for their values, who’s going to look out for the health care of people across our state, who is actually making sure that we’re holding businesses accountable who get tax breaks, who ship jobs overseas, about holding big pharmaceutical companies accountable for their contributions to the opioid crisis, making sure that we’re working to fix our roads and drastically change the entire scope of our infrastructure, not just roads and bridges but our energy infrastructure, and ultimately providing that opportunity. And they can go against us much as they want to, but we’re going continue to beat the drums. We’re going to continue to preach about this stuff and talk about all these issues as much as we can because it’s the right thing to do. And again, it’s what the people of this state, and it’s what the people of this country, are ultimately looking for.

We get nothing out of turning back on these issues, and it gives us a chance to continue to galvanize, to continue to organize for 2020. It gives us the opportunity to continue to organize for ’22. And sometimes people do have short memories. That’s why it’s up to us to continue to keep talking about our plan to improve lives of people across our state and across this country. That’s what the campaign was about. It wasn’t about being against the former governor. People knew who he was. He was in office for eight years. He’s in public office for 25 years. People knew very well who he was. This is our opportunity to tell the Wisconsin public who we were, and that’s what we have to do next year.

Because people know who Donald Trump is. He will have been in office for four years, but he will have been in the public eye for far longer. He’s a known entity. People wrestle with who Democrats are, who progressives are, what do we stand for. So, we have to travel to states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, every state, actually, but states that have been on the fence. Because Trump’s margin of victory was very narrow Wisconsin. Our margin of victory was very narrow in Wisconsin. So, we have to continue to have those conversations with people, again, whether it’s communities of color, younger voters, but also our rural community., Because like I said we lost 300 family farms. They need a solution. We have to be able to provide that solution for them. And I think that we can.

VALLAS: And one of the things that has been incredibly well-resourced over the decades has been the Republican ground game and sort of state bench game when it comes to infrastructure in the states, right? Whether that’s ALEC, whether that’s state legislators, whether that’s state legislatures I should say, whether that’s state courts, something that the Republican Party has been incredibly focused on for a long time and which, in some ways, the Democratic Party has been a little bit later to the game in coming to the table to resource. So, it’s been part of what you and I have talked about at various points, right, and sometimes over drinks. But one of the things that you have been really at the forefront of doing in a variety of different types of roles, not just your current role, has really been fighting back against this incredibly well-organized ALEC agenda-that’s, of course, the American Legislative Exchange Council — which sets up a lot of the sort of boilerplate legislation that we watch move through state after state after state after state as sort of a playbook. Talk a little bit about that.

BARNES: And so, I’ll say that I’ll push back on them having a strong ground game or grassroots infrastructure in states. Their infrastructure is a house of cards, and it’s credit cards. They have a lot of money to spend, and that’s what that amounts to. It’s not necessarily them being able to connect with their voters in an authentic way. You don’t see a whole lot of growth in their electorate right? Now whether it’s voter suppression or a lack of content, admittedly from our candidates, that keep people home. That’s the total of it. That’s the sum of it. So, with that being said, money is still a very frightening factor. There’s so much money being spent. And it also allows for a lot of lies to be told. And the same way on the panel, and I just got done talking about climate change and how it’s not just going to be any one thing. It’s going to be a collection of things.

VALLAS: You were talking about CAP’s Ideas Conference panel that you were on, yeah.

BARNES: Here at the CAP Ideas Conference, I got to talk about climate change and our plan with Senator Brian Schatz from Hawaii and Tom Steyer where it was remarked that there’s not going to be just one specific thing; it’s going to take everything. And with them, there’s so many — You look at what the infrastructure that they do have, whether it’s the media infrastructure, whether you get news outlets who don’t even reach — not the Fox News of the world, but the other, smaller entities — that reach maybe a couple thousand here or there. Well, if have enough of those, which they do, you get to a critical mass, and you get so much propaganda that’s just out there. It’s a huge propaganda machine, but it’s not just one thing. Fox News, the behemoth, however there are so many smaller entities that have a reach as well that do just as much damage or just enough damage to make the difference in elections. And the ALEC agenda, again across all states, there’s no secret, or it shouldn’t be a surprise that we see all these abortion bills coming up in states at the same time. It’s a very coordinated strategy that they’ve had for a while.

But one thing I can say that they’ve definitely done better than us is being in it for the long haul. Of course you lose on issues, you lose elections, it gets frustrating. But they’ve been at this for decades. And we have to be comfortable in knowing or in realizing that some of the things that we’re fighting for, we’re not going to see next year. We’re not going to see in the next two years. Now there are critical issues like climate change where we do only have a short window to address, but we have to understand that our strategy has to be long-term, and that’s what they’ve done. That’s how they were able to finally see most of this culminate in 2010 where they won all these elections, were in control of state legislatures across the country, got all these governorships, were in control of redistricting. And now we have what we have.

VALLAS: So, if you were to give some advice to progressives when it comes to how to better resource and support our state leaders, what is it that you want to see from the progressive movement so that we’re not so laser-focused only on Washington but are thinking about how we can be supporting our folks across the country who are fighting for these policies like you?

BARNES: Yeah. There are a lot of solid leaders in state government. There a lot of solid leaders in local government as well who are going to ultimately drive the change that we’re not going to see in Washington for at least for the next couple years. And we have to be able to highlight that. We have to be able to promote that and use these examples of what people are doing in their cities, small cities also, right? Like it’s easy to look at L.A., San Francisco’s, New York’s, but there are other people. I can point to my friend Eric Genrich who just got elected mayor of Green Bay, and I’m excited for the work he’s going to get ready to do. I got elected with him to the state Assembly. But we have to pay attention to those offices and what’s going on in those offices. Because people are going to see Eric, and he’s — Green Bay has 120,000 people. People are going to see him in the grocery store. People are going to vote to make a connection with him. And that’s also a pivotal part of our state. Northeastern Wisconsin, that’s going to be crucial to election outcomes in the future, in ’20 and ’22. So, when you have examples like that, people like him, who are just getting out there, who are young, who are ambitious and ready to make change, but also have a very real connection with their community, that is where we need to focus our attention.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Lt. Governor of Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes. Lt. Governor Barnes, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on this show.

BARNES: Yeah, that went by really quickly, but I had a great time.

VALLAS: I know. It always does, right? We’ll have you back soon, and we’re excited to hear where things go for this administration in Wisconsin.

BARNES: Thank you.

VALLAS: Don’t go away. More Off-Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[hip hop music break]

Welcome back to Off-Kilter. Next up, as part of Off-Kilter Ideas Conference lineup, headline economic statistics like the national unemployment rate have economists trumpeting a strong economy. But recent data tell us the U.S. birth rate has reached its lowest point in over three decades, something ordinarily seen only in times of economic downturn. So, I caught up with Betsey Stevenson, Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan and a former member of the White House Council on Economic Advisers under President Obama, to dig into what’s going on and what it tells us about the nation’s work/family policies. Let’s take a listen.

Betsey, thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

BETSEY STEVENSON: Oh, I’m glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So, we learned just a few days ago from some new data that the birthrate in the United States has now dropped to a 32-year low. And this is good news in some respects, in terms of falling teen births, but it also seems to be a story about young people not being able to quite get their financial footing, particularly given that we’re talking about this type of a statistic in a strong economy overall and not in a time of recession where we would expect this type of trend. What would you attribute this type of a falling birthrate and to this level of a low, too, in this kind of an economy?

STEVENSON: So, I’m really glad that you highlighted the fact that the economy’s really strong because normally what we see is a strong economy leads people to have more children. People have jobs, their wages are going up, it’s a great time to expand your family, have a child, have an additional child. And we’re not seeing that right now, and that’s really surprising. So, what’s going on? Well, I think people feel that they can’t afford children. So, what are some of the things that’s contributing to not being able to afford children? High cost of childcare, right? And people don’t realize this until you’re actually facing that high cost of child care, but it costs as much in most states to send a kid through their first four or five years of child care before they’re eligible for kindergarten as it does to send that child to college. But you have less time to prepare for it. Now you have the whole 18 years of that kid’s life to prepare for college, but you got nine months of pregnancy to prepare for child care costs. And people realize that those costs are going to get in their way. So, that’s a big thing.

They also know that they’ve got to just push a little bit harder in their job to get that next promotion, to get that wage, and they don’t feel that they can take the time. There’s not the infrastructure in our workplaces and our workplace policies that allow people to hit pause, have a baby, take some parental leave, and come back and pick up where they left off. The sad fact is that when women have babies, their wage gains slow to a crawl. So, up through your 20s and your early 30s, most people’s wages are really growing. That’s the time where you get those promotions, get the raise, get the next promotion. And that happens for both men and for women. But once babies come into the picture, that stops for women, and it doesn’t stop for men. Women know that.

VALLAS: Now one of the things that people might not be aware of, but when it comes to the intersection of poverty and of family, one of the three main drivers of poverty in this country is the birth of a child, something that should be a celebrated and happy experience, but which plunges tons of families and tons of moms into poverty that they weren’t hoping for, weren’t expecting, and which doesn’t set them up to raise that family. A big part of that is the fact that we don’t have paid leave in this country in a meaningful way.

STEVENSON: Right. So, you just can’t work right away once you’ve had a baby, you know? And that’s just the reality that you can’t jump out of the hospital bed and run back to your job. You don’t have a baby on your lunch break. You need some time off. And if that time’s not paid, that’s time without money, without an income when you actually really need an income. You’ve got perhaps some hospital bills, co-pays, something associated with the birth. You’ve got this child that needs medical care, that needs to be fed and clothed. It needs a crib. So, you have increasing expenses and decreasing income. And for people who are sort of just scraping by before they have a child, that can plunge them into poverty.

VALLAS: So, tell me a little bit about — there’s a lot we could talk about, about paid leave — but getting out of the United States for a second, what is the picture when it comes to other developed countries, other peer countries, when it comes to paid leave? I feel like that’s a helpful baseline before we think about what our policy landscape here looks like.

STEVENSON: So, when it comes to paid, leave the United States is one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t offer paid maternity leave, right? So, almost every country in the world — developed and developing — offers paid maternity leave. And most developed countries offer both maternity and paternity leave. And when we’re looking at our peer countries, developed countries, what we see is that it’s done in a particular way. It’s all through a social insurance policy where we all chip in together to make sure that when families have a new child enter the home, they don’t have a loss of income from the very beginning. And so, we get access to this paid maternity leave, paid paternity leave that ensures that we keep having an income despite the fact that this is a time where we need to slow down our work and take a little bit of time off.

There’s some other policies that have really shown some important promise, like baby bonuses, so actually giving people some additional cash at the time a child comes into the home and making sure that they have what they need to cover those additional costs. No, it’s a question of how much you want to support children and the introduction of a child to family whether you provide these kinds of resources that help families thrive.

VALLAS: Now, when it comes to the paid leave conversation, I suspect that our listeners are probably familiar with the family act. That’s a piece of legislation that would provide paid family leave in a in a substantial way this country has not seen before. There are also other proposals that have been out there, some of which have actually come from Republicans, that have been different approaches at tackling paid family leave. What is your reaction to the fact that we’re having a conversation on both sides of the aisle about this issue even though the two sides do seem to be pretty far apart?

STEVENSON: So, it’s clear that with the 21st Century, the United States has realized that we’re really far behind, and it’s time to provide support to families in the form of paid parental leave of some kind. So, it’s really thrilling to see how much the policy landscape has moved, that both sides of the aisle feel that this is an issue that they have to talk about. It’s not nice to have; it’s something that families are really insisting that they have, and we’ve seen that shift.

So, what do we know about the right way to do it? So, we’re lucky, in some sense, being the very last country to do this. We’ve learned a lot from what other countries have done and what they have learned. So, first of all, we know that it’s best when it’s provided as a social insurance plan. What does that mean? That means that it’s not something where we want to require that employers just pay people’s wages. And there’s good reason why we don’t want to require that employers pay people’s wages when they’re on maternity or paternity leave. It’s because that can be a big hit to a single employer. We want to spread that risk across more people. So, if you’re a big employer with 10,000 workers, you could pay it, but if you’re a small employer with a 100 workers or 50 workers, you could have a year where you have four people on maternity leave. That’s going to be a pretty big cost to you in the grand scheme of things. And that could be spread over a larger group of people.

And frankly, the other thing we know is that when we require employers pay it out of their own pocket, employers try to avoid hiring the types of people they think are most likely to take it. So, it increases discrimination. We have seen the evidence on this, and that’s why it’s just really not the way to go.

VALLAS: Now, one of the approaches that is not quite the business taking it on for itself, this is something we’ve seen a lot of companies start to do, right? That’s been a lot of what’s been in the news lately about paid leave is companies kind of doing their own thing. But we’ve also seen a number of Republican-proposed approaches that are not quite here: here’s a new benefit. But that are, let’s maybe think about taking away from another benefit that people might receive in the future like Social Security and then reallocate that in some way to paid leave. What are your views on that type of aa proposal? We’ve seen the likes of that from, say, Marco Rubio.

STEVENSON: So, there are lots of employers that are voluntarily providing paid maternity leave, paid paternity leave, paid parental leave, paid family leave. Who are they providing this for? That’s the right question, right? Ask yourself who is getting this kind of leave voluntarily provided by their employer? And it’s really disproportionately high-wage, high-income, highly-educated workers. So, why are employers doing it? Look. A lot of employers realize that if they don’t offer this kind of leave, they’re going to lose workers, and attrition cost them a lot of money. So, these employers, a lot of employers realize that if they offer paid leave, what they’ll be able to do is hold onto more of these workers. So, if you have a high-wage worker, that’s someone who might cost you a year’s salary to replace if they are to leave. So then, you can take a company like Google, which crunched the numbers and found that they actually saved money by offering paid family leave. They saved money because they boosted their retention rate enough to compensate for the cost of the paid family leave. So, that means that some workers are going to get this voluntarily. Who’s not going to get it voluntarily? The most vulnerable workers, the lowest-wage workers. Those are workers where the employers are like, look, I’m not paying for this extra benefit, this compensation. It’s too high relative to what I’m already paying them.

So then, when you talk about a proposal, like let’s take it out of Social Security, well, if we cut back Social Security, who’s most likely to get hurt? Lowest-wage workers. So, we’re going to take the benefit from the lowest-wage workers in order to give a benefit to the lowest-wage workers. So, that policy doesn’t really work unless we’re really thinking about revamping Social Security in lots of different ways, upping the benefit we give to the lowest-wage workers, thinking about who is really able to keep working if we were to say, raise the retirement age, making it easier to transition from working to disability insurance to Social Security, if we raise the retirement age and we have a bunch of workers who are just physically unable to do that. We need to protect the most vulnerable workers’ ability to rely on Social Security for their retirement because that is their primary income in retirement. And so, you don’t want to be taking somebody’s primary income in retirement and trying to help them out when they’re in their 20s and 30s having children. That’s not a solution to the problem. So, it’s not that you couldn’t do this through Social Security. You could if you expanded Social Security as a program and made sure you’re protecting the retirement income of the most vulnerable workers.

VALLAS: Instead of squeezing the balloon in a way that is just stealing from future you to help out current you, which is sort of what I’m hearing you saying.

STEVENSON: Exactly. Exactly.

VALLAS: So, it feels like another dimension of the situation we’re talking about with low birth rates, it’s sort of hard to think about that and to talk about that and young people getting their footing and starting families without also talking about the student debt crisis. Which is of course, at all times all-time highs and over $1 trillion, and people know all the stats. But there’s another level of this, which is how does this play into the policy landscape for women, as we’ve been talking about? I actually was just pulling up some statistics earlier today about how the student debt crisis — in ways I wasn’t aware of until thinking about what I was going to talk about with you — how it disproportionately hurts women. Women, it turns out, hold nearly two thirds of outstanding student debt in this country, about $930 billion, compared to the $531 billion who are held by men. That comes to us from a report by the American Association of University Women. Female graduates themselves, as individuals, also owe more on average than men. Is this part of what’s going on as well in terms of women choosing that they’re not quite ready and don’t feel quite supported by our policy landscape to start a family?

STEVENSON: So, I think that there’s a combination of several things that are happening for women. They are coming out of school with a lot of debt that they need to pay back. But let’s start with a positive, which is that women are going to school. So, the wages of college graduates compared to the wages of high school graduates, the premium for being a college graduate is at an all-time high right now. And who has responded to that incentive? Women. Women have doubled down doing more work, going to school, entering college at higher numbers, graduating at higher numbers, graduating with honors at higher numbers. They are investing in their marketable skills. They’re coming out with having spent years building these skills so that they can earn higher wages in the labor force. They’ve got debt associated with it, and now they’ve got to climb the ladder in the labor force in order to get their just desserts from having done all this work. They need to get those higher wages.

The problem that these women face, as they come out of college, they are ready to earn these higher wages. But the thing that we talked about earlier is as soon as you have a baby, you stop getting those promotions and those raises. So, they want to go as far as they can in their career before that pause button, that baby that’s a pause button, comes along because they know that they’re never going to be able to successfully climb the ladder after that baby’s born as well as they can before. So, what we see is the age of first birth, particularly among the most highly-educated women, is at the highest it’s ever been, and it’s now in their mid-30. So, we can’t have the age of first birth go much higher than the mid- to late-30s before we hit real fertility constraints for these women.

Why are they pushing it so far? They’re pushing it because they want to earn those higher wages to pay back the education that they got. They’re facing a ton of debt. They’re focusing on their career and their jobs. So, when we’re talking about these young women with a ton of student loans, it’s not just about paying the debt back. Obviously, paying the debt back creates a constraint for them, but it’s also about making sure that they can advance in their career. So, when we think about solving that problem, I think we need to think about both lenses of solving it. One is making sure that that debt isn’t constraining their ability to actually have a child, to pay for the kinds of things that you need to provide a child with.

And then I think the second thing is we need to think about how do we let women have children and then get back on the fast track? Because we’re educating our women more than our men right now, and yet we don’t know how to get women back on the fast track after they’ve had a baby. And with growing longevity, people are living a long time. We need to figure out how we continue to make sure that we’re using women’s skills to their fullest potential in the labor market and not letting the fact that they might slow down for five years or even 10 years when they have kids prevent them from speeding back up when they’re ready to speed back up. And that, I think, is incredibly important.

I want to make it so that women can have the choice to have the kind of career path that they want to have. And that means pausing when they want to pause and accelerating when they want to accelerate. Because some women do want to take some time off when they have young kids at home. They don’t want to work as hard. And we don’t have an economy that’s very forgiving of that. And I think there should be across the aisle, bipartisan agreement that people should have choice to do what they want to do without there being these long-term consequences. And right now, there are lots of women who, they work when they have small kids. They’re bringing home almost no income because they’re taking every dime they earn, and they are paying for the highest-quality child care they can get for their kids. But they’re continuing to work because they know if they don’t that they won’t be able to provide for their kids once they start school. They won’t be able to be in the labor force and have the same kind of earnings. And so, you basically tread water when you have young kids in the home just so that you can stay on the route to a good job.

VALLAS: In the last couple of minutes that I have with you, a lot of folks talked about this last round of midterms and the new class coming into Congress as sort of another round of the Year of the Woman, that we’ve got this record number of women in Congress, and we’ve got women across the country in state legislatures as well all taking on leadership roles. What gets you excited in this political moment when it comes to the policy solutions people are talking about and that are gaining support by the very serious people?

STEVENSON: You know, we’re a really rich country. And in a rich country, certain things in our life should be normal. When you’re sick, you stay home, and you don’t spread your germs to everybody else. And you recover, and you go back to work when you’re feeling better. When you’re about to walk out the door to work, and your kid throws up all over the kitchen, you call your boss and say, “I’m sorry. I’ve got to take care of my child. They’re sick today.” And it’s not a big deal. That should be part of our everyday normal. And so, things like paid sick leave, paid parental leave, these are just normal policies that allow us to live the kind of life that you should be able to live in a rich country, one where we have some flexibility, where we work really hard when we can, and we pull back a little bit when we really need to. When we have a health crisis, when somebody we love has a health crisis, when we need to take care of kids, we have that ebb and flow that allows us to have a really full life where we produce a lot, where we are able to take care of the people that we love, and we’re able to take care of ourselves, and we’re able to have that really fulfilling, long life. So, that’s what makes me excited.

And I think it’s why women have done so well, is because people in politics have talked a long time about kitchen table issues, but these are really the kitchen table issues. They’re the way that people want to live their lives. I don’t care what side of the political aisle you’re on, what people want to be able to do is know that when tough times come, they’re going to make it through it.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Betsey Stevenson. She’s an economist, Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan Gerald Ford School of Public Policy. She’s also a former member of the White House Council on Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. Betsey, thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

STEVENSON: It was my pleasure. Thank you.

VALLAS: Don’t go away. More Off-Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[hip hop music break]

You’re listening Off-Kilter. I’m Rebecca Vallas. Last, but far from least, as part of the CAP Ideas Conference lineup, Darrick Hamilton is the Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. I caught up with him to talk about how we address the nation’s racial wealth gap. Let’s take a listen.

Darrick, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

DARRICK HAMILTON: Thank you. Glad to be back.

VALLAS: So today, African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population, but they only hold about 2.6 percent of the country’s wealth. Research tells us black people with higher paying jobs still have less wealth than white people with lower incomes who often benefit from generations of wealth. It’s been built up over the years. And even black people with college degrees are likely to have less wealth than white people without a high school degree. Now, racial inequality and the racial wealth gap is a huge part of your scholarship and your research. What’s driving these kinds of disparities in the 21st Century in the United States of America?

HAMILTON: We have a long history of blacks not being able to accumulate wealth, and when they were able to accumulate wealth, we have wealth stripping, we have terror, we have fraud, we have white capping, we have Jim Crow. We have a long history not only with blacks not being able to accumulate wealth, but when they were able to accumulate wealth, that wealth was literally stripped from them. And then we also have, on the other side of the token, a government that facilitated wealth for white individuals and excluded blacks. And wealth is intergenerational. We know that wealth begets more wealth. So, this notion that you can study hard, work hard, and that’s the pathway to wealth, well, those things might be important. But without capital, they’re not that beneficial. Ultimately, for most Americans, it is having an asset that’s going to passively appreciate over your life. That’s the mechanism by which they’ve been able to generate wealth. So, if blacks don’t have capital to begin with as a result of a long history, nor do they have access to a government program that provides them the mechanisms to get into an asset that will appreciate, it’s a no brainer that they will continue to have low levels of wealth.

VALLAS: Now, a lot of your research over the years has actually looked at how policy choices that we have made, including in recent months, in recent years, have only exacerbated that racial wealth gap. One of the areas you’ve actually looked at that in has been around the tax code, for example. Talk a little bit about some of the specific policy decisions that maybe are more recent in people’s memory, that are the kinds of things that are only reinforcing these types of disparities.

HAMILTON: Yeah, I mean true credit can go to a scholar like Michael Sherraden who shifted the conversation away from just income and thinking about assets and the poor. Ultimately, it is assets that provide you the foundation to be able to withstand a downgrade in your income, to be able to withstand a shock that you didn’t anticipate. It is assets that allow you to be able to finance an expensive education. It is assets that allows you to purchase a home as opposed to rent, which not only gives you shelter, but allows you to have wealth accumulation in perpetuity and passed down on to future generations. Basically, asset security is vital for somebody if they really want to have financial agency in their lives to be able to make decisions, to purchase big items, to be able to change course. If I wanted to leave my job as a university professor and pursue some entrepreneurial activity, I would need some capital to do so.

VALLAS: And the way that you’re describing that I mean it actually sort of links the concept of having savings, which a lot of folks in this country don’t have. We hear statistics like 4 in 10 Americans don’t have even $400 in the bank. That’s a much larger share when you’re thinking about the slice of folks who are communities of color, as you’re describing. But the way that you’re describing the importance of assets here, it really links it to the concept of freedom.

HAMILTON: I think that’s right, right? We use words like “freedom” and “choice” to describe the benefits of the market. But if you don’t have shelter, if you don’t have capital, if you can’t feed your family, the ability to make choices, it’s not an authentic freedom and choice. It is ultimately wealth that provides people choice, freedom, and optionality in their life. With wealth, you can really change course and do things. Whereas, if you don’t have wealth, to be frank, you’re at the whim of hopefully an employer who can dictate what you can have to have subsistence in your life.

VALLAS: Now, some of the solutions that you have been, and the policies that you’ve been, talking about at the Ideas Conference are some of the ones that listeners may be familiar with but may not have thought about as being specific to closing the racial wealth gap, for example, baby bonds. Talk a little bit about that policy idea, something that’s gaining a lot of traction these days in various political circles, and why that’s a solution that would have tremendous benefit, not just for say, taking a huge bite out of child poverty, but in actually closing the racial wealth gap.

HAMILTON: Yeah. I mean ultimately, we’re going to need a whole package of goods that are essential to offer people agency and self-determination in their lives. And as we’ve been talking about, a cornerstone of that self-determination is capital itself. So, what baby bonds does is it provides everybody with a birthright to capital that will, somewhat in a counterintuitive way, divorce them from their family. Your life chances as an adult should not be strictly tied to the race or the family position in which you’re born into. So, there’s a role of the public sector to come in and provide everyone with some capital so that they too can have the asset security that comes about from getting some transfer at a key point your life, again, to put you into a home as opposed to a renter position or to put you into a debt-free education that gives you access to a managerial or professional job where you get some of the benefits of a 401(k) or some capital that simply allows you to start a business with some assets where that business will at least have a chance to grow and survive.

VALLAS: What are the other types of policies that you hope people take seriously in a conversation about the racial wealth gap? Some of which you’ve also been talking about here at the Ideas Conference.

HAMILTON: Yeah. I mean ultimately, it is capital that will allow one to accumulate assets, but around that, we can think about a host of other things. For example, the criminal justice system is a way in which we strip communities of their assets. Frankly, there’s reform going around, around bonds, but that’s been a way in which we’ve stripped people, stripped communities of some assets. We can talk about fines and fees that are imposed on a community, so those debts that indenturetude from being caught up in a criminal justice system. And it’s not always violent crimes. Frankly, most of it is nonviolent crimes. That puts people in a situation that limits their ability to grow their assets and can be thought of as wealth stripping. That’s one policy.

I mean we could think of other things as well: credit scores. If we had a more transparent mechanism that was fairer of being able to rate an individual’s credit worthiness or ability to borrow, that would be something that could address wealth inclusion for many people that end up in scenarios where they’re not able to accumulate credit scores that are useful to go into the private sector. But we know that black families in particular end up with — We can think of credit scores as a new form of redlining, as a matter of fact. When we look at whites and blacks with similar incomes, it is likely the case that black individuals will have lower credit scores than their comparably-waged white counterparts. And why does that come about,? Well it comes about because at a point in their lives that white individual might have had access to some capital that put them in a vehicle that would lead them to a better credit score like a home as opposed to renting, for example.

There are other policies as well. We could think of Medicare for all. We know that the number one cause for families going bankrupt is often health care. And if we took the point of finance away at the delivery of medical care, at that point of when we deliver medical care, that would have psychological benefits, but obviously, material benefits as well, where people aren’t threatened in terms of their subsistence, that tragic choice of having subsistence versus acquiring medical care at that point in their lives.

VALLAS: You mentioned redlining before, which obviously, comes up a lot in conversations around racial inequality as a really important part of that history of how we got to where we are. There’s been legislation proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren to offer down payment assistance to homebuyers who are living in formerly-redlined neighborhoods where the federal government once denied people access to mortgages. What do you think about those types of policy solutions? Do you think that that’s the kind of stuff that we need to be looking at to look quite literally dismantle, brick by brick, the racist components of the path to this level of racial inequality that we currently have? Or would you be thinking about undoing that kind of damage in a different way?

HAMILTON: I applaud Senator Warren for coming out with these bold policies to not only provide contemporary access to housing for everyone but also to redress some of our our sordid history in which we segregated communities and redlined communities in a way that they weren’t able to accumulate assets. So, I think that’s a great policy that she put forth. I mean I think we’d have to be conscious of some of the unintended consequences around gentrification. We need to ensure that the intended population actually benefits from it and that we don’t offer incentives to a gentry to come in and further benefit from a government program to leverage the capital they already have to further benefit from that program. But Senator Warren should be applauded.

I mean another program that Senator Warren has put out is one around debt, college debt. She has talked about eliminating debt for those individuals that make below a certain threshold. And I believe it’s $100,000. I think that is a program that is race conscious from a justice standpoint. We know that whites are more likely to go to college than black, and we know that there is overall more white student debt than there is student debt for blacks. But we know that for blacks that actually do go to college, they are more likely to end up with student loan debt, and the student loan debt that they have is higher than that of white counterparts. So, from a justice standpoint, not only would that redress that condition, it would encourage more blacks to go to college because the notion that they will go to college with debt, that would be eliminated.

I know Bernie Sanders has also come out with programs like that. So, I applaud both Senator Sanders and Senator Warren for having the audacity to come up with these bold policies that are changing our society around justice and inclusion that are race conscious.

VALLAS: Now, you’ve mentioned a couple of times the term “race conscious,” and these are obviously proposals that would help anybody, irrespective of their race, but which will have themselves a disproportionately high benefit for communities of color for the reasons that you’re describing. But that, in a lot of ways, gets at the heart of one of the cruxes of the debate that goes on in this policy space, which is, are we really going to be able to target policy interventions to communities of color to address the racial disparities we’ve been talking about? Or do we, for policy reasons, for legal reasons, for political reasons, need to be thinking about how to address racial disparities in a more neutral way that helps everybody but disproportionately benefits communities of color? Where do you come down in that type of a debate, which has actually gotten recent attention in the last few weeks because of some level of media coverage of the issue of targeted universalism and whether that’s really something that we can pursue as a serious policy approach?

HAMILTON: Right. So, I’m going to have a multifaceted answer to this question. [laughs]

VALLAS: I would expect nothing less to a multifaceted question, in fairness.

HAMILTON: I will lead with the point that our current legal infrastructure is just that: our current legal infrastructure. We can have a different legal infrastructure going forward. And in the past we indeed had a different legal infrastructure. So, that constraint is something that is alive and well but not one that is binding in perpetuity. So, that’s one point. So, again, I see politicians designing policies that might not be specifically designed around race, and I understand that that is consistent with our current legal infrastructure. But again, that does not forebode a movement to change that infrastructure and to come up with race-specific policies going forward.

VALLAS: And we’re obviously being super vague here, but I think people know what we’re talking about. The implication here is a policy gets put into effect, and then is it going to survive challenge if it gets up to the current Supreme Court? We’re being a little coy, but I think people are following what we’re saying when you say, “legal infrastructure.”

HAMILTON: Exactly right. Then the other point is, do we need universal race-conscious policies, or do we need race-specific policies? The answer is both: race-conscious programs that are universal is part of a domain that I would group into an economic bill of rights where we think about essential goods and services where there’s a role for the public to provide as public options to everyone. We need those. We need those with regards to education, with regards to health care, with regards to capital, with regards to jobs, etc., etc. That’s one point, and that would benefit whites and blacks.

And why do we even use the word “race conscious?” Well, there’s a historical context. We had these policies in the past with New Deal legislation, with post-World War II legislation. And ironically, the race conscious was in an adversarial way where we designed the policies in a way that there was local authority. And in the context of the Jim Crow South, the local authority of administration was done so in a way that benefited whites and excluded blacks. We also forbade the ability of the federal government to come in with anti-discrimination mechanisms in the administration of those policies. That was all part of what’s commonly known as the Faustian Bargain to get the New Deal legislation passed and to get a largely southern, white Democratic Party to go along with it that it was done in a way to maintain the Jim Crow South: benefit whites and exclude blacks. As a result of that history, we have a lot of the racial wealth disparities that we see today. So, now we need to think about universal policies and think about them as in both race- and gender-conscious way and a proactive, affirmative way so that although we’re going to have a universal policy, we will be intentional in targeting the domains by which we are most unevenly distributed. And then also thinking about the outcomes in a way that we can bring about equity. That’s racial justice. That is racial and economic justice. And that is the frame we need to use and the lens we need to use so that we can learn from our past.

By the way, the movement away from that trajectory of inclusive economic rights that we had before, is that the result of dividing us along racial dimensions? The backlash of the free market revolution is, in part, grounded in an anti-blackness where we demonize government, and we demonize people with imageries of “welfare queens,” “deadbeat dad,” all these racialized imageries in a way to divide a populace and allow us to think about anything that the government was doing was benefiting these “con artists,” these black “con artists” that were trying to get over. And it led to spillover effect where we racialize white poverty. So, that’s the frame that we have now, and that is why we need universal policies that are done now in a race-conscious way where we’re thinking about humanity, our common humanity, we’re thinking about sustainability, and we’re thinking about justice. If we ground our new infrastructure i in justice, I think that that’s a much better way. And it’ll be long lasting and sustainable.

So, I haven’t mentioned the issue on race-specific policies. And then obviously, the thing that is said but not said is reparations. I wholeheartedly think that we need reparations, and I wholeheartedly think that reparations is something that is attainable and attainable in my lifetime. So, it is not just pie in the sky. And the question might be, well, what is the point of reparations? Well, reparations has three phases. The first is an honest interrogation of our past with authority and with authenticity. Well, if we are better able to understand why we have this gross inequality today, the role that the government played in fraud, in extraction, in terror with white capping, with Jim Crow, with slavery when blacks literally were the capital assets for a white land-owning plantation class. If we were to really look at that history and fully understand the ramifications of that history, that not only would restore dignity to a population that we denigrate as somehow deficient, defective, and I’m namely talking about black people, but it would also allow us to change narratives about how we think about poverty more generally. We would no longer be able to frame policy from an anti-black standpoint once we’ve had the authentic interrogation of our past and admitted fault and apologize for that. But that apology will be empty without the redress.

So, the second phase of reparations would be redress, and it would be redress for specific acts that were committed or specific acts, plural, that were committed. And the recipients would be those that were harmed or the descendants of those that were harmed. That would be the redress. And then we could talk about the forms of redress. The forms of redress: a cash payment. The symbolism of unconditional cash for this harm that was done to you, that’s useful and beneficial, but it can’t stop there. We know that ownership of the means of production provides income in perpetuity. Or we know that ownership of land will allow you to have potential income from that land, but it also will allow you to have appreciation as land values go up going into the future. So, a cash payment in and of itself, ironically, could be detrimental to the black community, not because they’re going to engage in some malfeasance or engage in illiteracy with regards to how they spend that money, but because they don’t own things in this country. You led off this interview talking about black people own 2.5 percent of the wealth of our country despite being 13 percent of the population. So, the redress of reparations would have to be in the form of capital at least in some proportion of how we compensate.

And then the third phase — and this is the happy phase — we move on. This is the phase where we really come together, no longer in the rhetorical terms about what America is meant to represent, but we have a place that’s grounded in both racial and economic justice. And it’s just a better society.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Darrick Hamilton. He’s the Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. He’s also a professor at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University. I can’t think of a better place to leave this conversation than there. But Darrick, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show.

HAMILTON: Thank you. I always enjoy speaking with you.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart and David Ballard. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow, and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

♪ I want freedom (freedom)

Freedom (freedom)

Now, I don’t know where it’s at

But it’s calling me back

I feel my spirit is revealing,

And now we just trynta get freedom (freedom)

What we talkin’ bout…. ♪